New Zealand plants' deep roots in Calif.
[...] of two parts on New Zealand plants in the Bay Area.Few Californians are aware of it, but plants from New Zealand have deep roots in our state's horticultural history.
The Maori ate the young stems and roots and used other parts medicinally; Europeans brewed beer from it.
Tough and drought tolerant, it shows up in yards, gardens, median strips, shopping malls, institutional plantings, in multicolored cultivars and dwarf forms.
The ubiquity of New Zealand plants in San Francisco came as a surprise to a contingent of Maori artists we met a few years back at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center.
Traditionally, the leaves were used to make clothing, gorgeous ceremonial cloaks decorated with feathers, plant fibers and dyes, and for containers, mats, dishes, cordage (ropes, snares, nets and fishing lines), even baby rattles.
(They also planned to use Norfolk Island "pine" trunks for ships' masts.) None of them knew how to process harakeke, so an overseer kidnapped a couple of young Maori men to teach the struggling colony.
Plan didn't workBut fiber was the province of Maori women, and besides, these guys were nobility:
After they'd spent six months staring homeward and singing heart-rending songs of exile, the colony's captain sent them back.
